ad wars

There's a storm brewing on the horizon, one that threatens the low-cost structures that we currently have in place and that everybody can afford, and taken to the extreme, undermines the fundamentals of democracy.
GlobalTV is claiming freedom of expression to strike down the laws against pharmaceutical advertising, because they want to put more money in their pockets. But where will that money come from? They don't care, but we should. They want to use our pockets to pad their bottom line, and the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, ad agencies and marketing firms will each take a cut in the process. Sure, that may sound like a libertariainism success case, "the way capitalism works", and while it may contribute to short-sighted economic indicators like job creation, it flies in the face of the philosophy of Objectivism because "no one has the right to take what belongs to others by physical force or fraud." Anybody who claims that we each have the right to make pharmaceutical decisions for ourselves is obviously forgetting the reasons why we collectively gave doctors and pharmacists (and all other professional orders) the mandate to do what is best for the public and police themselves accordingly. Devolving that responsibility into the hands of every Tom Dick and Harriet (along with other deconstructionist tendencies currently taking the upper hand) will eventually bring us back into the Dark Ages where people, uneducated and untrusting, can be controlled by unscrupulous leaders through the use of intimidation, emotional blackmail and force.